We have been MC members now for about 3.5 years and happy up until the changes. I realize we're just a small little business within the grand scheme of MC things. However, even if it falls on deaf ears, I am going to speak my opinion.
WE HATE THE NEW SITE. It's absolutely terrible. It smacks of Yelp, and we hate them. Let's start by saying that the information about OUR business is all runintogetherandits a MESS!!! There is nothing uniform about it. No proper paragraphs so that the reader can read our information properly. It's a nightmare!
The pages are way TOO BUSY with all kinds of information that becomes confusing. The colors are awful, red, blue, etc.
We pay good money to be LOCAL MERCHANTS, I don't see that tag anywhere on our site and where is our "TOP MERCHANT BADGE, we pay for that TOO!
The site says get a "free estimate." says who...we're contractors, and we don't always give FREE ESTIMATES. There should be a disclaimer with that information somewhere on the site. We ourselves have stated a disclaimer-but consumers will have a difficult time finding it somewhere in our business information.
Sorry Merchant Circle, as far as being NEW...that it is, but improved....it is NOT!!!
I hope that if most of the MC members who have invested lots of loyalty and $$$ over the years state that they don't like the new site, that it will be reverted back to the old.

I beleive the 'People Who Viewed This Also Viewed' box is an unwelcome advertisment on my page and for those of you that are not paying for the 'Premium Listing Upgrade' it should at least be moved MUCH lower on the listing page. It should not be placed above the merchant information where it is encouraging vistors to leave your page before they read about you and your business.

For those of us PAYING for the 'Premium Listing Upgrade' we are paying for the right to NOT have other advertising on our page and the 'People Who Viewed This Also Viewed' IS AN ADVERTISEMENT and MC should either refund our fee or get it off our page!

On the old MC forum I have written much about the changes cause, effect ect.

Getting into this site SATISFACTION is horrible....i HAD TO USE MY GOOGLE
account to sign in and that DOES NOT ME HAPPY WHAT-SO-EVER. :(

Our MC account should either "WORK HERE" as a sign in or shut this down as SPAMMING OUR PERSONAL E MAILS....a forced objective as I see it!

I pay for items at MC that are now missing totally,,,,,,,The parent company that bought MC does not respond to E-Mails.....SAD> :( That is not good business practice? Clearly, it appears they are interested only in "per click" and nothing else.

I understand why MC added a component to reach customers, but they need to keep the behind the scenes intact for businesses. One of the main reasons, I enjoyed the features of MC because it allowed me to create backlinks to my web site information through the Community Bullentin Boards. Many hours have been devoted to this feature and now it has disappeared - All of it is gone! PLEASE, bring back this feature so that the businesses promoting on your site continue to benefit. Without all of us there would not be a MC site.

Do correct the spacing flaws between online view of newletters verses emailed version. The spacing is not the same between paragraphs. Allow editing of information to retain the necessary formatting. Move the text away from the photos because they are now blending in with the photos when there is no white space.

Do correct the layout for what potential customers see, so that the business listing is not invisible among all the other businesses being featured on the same page. Allow spacing in typed text to make visual friendly.

Do allow photos to be a visual feature as before. There should be a logo for the business listing when the page loads. Without this the customers will not be able to distinguish from one business to another. What this means for MC? If the site isn't customer friendly, the customers move to a better site and MC loses business.

Allow "My Story" to return as a tab on the customer page view, so that the business can begin a personalized relationship engaging the customer.

RW Advancements in Minneapolis, MN is not coming up in the MC search - why?

The category feature is not working. It states one needs to be deleted to add another but it will not add. Where is the "Add" button?

Please, please fix the back end for businesses so that we can continue to promote our businesses successfully. Please bring back all the Community Bullentin Boards so that all our hours of work has not been lost. Thanks!

I agree with all your points. This change has really hurt the appeal of merchantcircle. We have put in hundreds of hours developing our listing, and it was all thrown out the window in one day with no prior warning that it was coming. This is a marketing nightmare and MAJOR blunder!

I know everything is still there, posting screen shots, showing everything the same as before, also explaining most sites need updating from time to time, just like Twitter, FaceBook, Google +, YouTube does on a regular basis. If I had control of FTP & DNS, just like anyone else, I could make changes as I like, but I don't, and neither do they, who are complaining. Also explaining this is FREE, so don't look a gift horse in the mouth, for crying out loud. lol So hope MC sends out another mass email, helping with instruction moving between the two, as it is confusing for some.

Why is there a "Get a Quote" sign over my company name and address? You can't even see what the name of the company is. My listing looks awful. The picture that I use is now way at the bottom of the page. Actually the first thing that caught my eye was the list of other companies that had viewed my page. Now, those names could be seen.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled What Happened?.

I was wondering the same thing. Asked privately, then publicly, but got no answer either way. My first post on the topic was apparently deleted by someone who thought it would be best for other Merchant Circle users not to see it.

I am really happy that I'm not the only MC business who has issues with the new site. I personally "usually," never have problems with upgrades, new ideas, innovations, improvements, etc., but our site before was at least reader friendly.
Now it is so busy with "filler," information everywhere that it becomes very difficult to stay on topic when trying to read OUR business information.
I agree with so many folks here in the forum. I want to know why the "People Who Viewed This Also Viewed" is smack dab middle of MY information page. That takes the readers eyes off of our business information and puts it there!! We DON'T WANT THAT!!
In addition, we pay specifically for a advertisement FREE site, and yet there are all types of advertisements on our business listing page. Here's an example:
Ads by Google
Assembler
www.jobsonline.net$10-$55/Hour. Found: 386 Jobs In Your Area. Hiring Now!
What's up with that????
Come on Merchant Circle, listen to YOUR clients. Get these listings corrected for us loyal and long standing customers.

Rick, a number of the 8 issues you raised above are already in the process of being addressed with planned changes to the new site. While the many complaints here in the forum suggest that the redesign was "botched", I can tell you that the early information is that pageviews for the redesigned MerchantCircle.com listings are significantly up over comparable days-of-the-week prior to the new release. This is very early data and may not be statistically significant, so we will be watching carefully. We did A/B testing of the new designs prior to releasing them, and though we now see that merchants--many of them experts in the web design world--don't think the new design is better, consumer visitors did and still do, showing much higher engagement with the pages than before.

We have a brand new SOLR index for our internal search, which for many is decidedly better than our prior site search. While not many users find listings in MerchantCircle via the internal search (they come directly to the listing from Google or Bing instead), we do want the internal search to provide relevant local businesses. So if you could respond to this thread with a post including a link to your MC business listing, that will let us look at the search results and see what is happening with this particular query.

If I enter a search for Office Furniture in Phoenix, AZ I get the following from the beginning:
1. Google ads
2."SEARCH RESULTS"
3. Three listings that look like "featured listings" (They have a slight gray background). They are:
a. A wall faux finishing company
b. a window cleaning company
c. A furniture company (residential, not Office Furniture)
4. More Google Ads
5. 17 listings, many that are not claimed or have any ratings or content
6. Next page: Google ads, etc. 13 more listings and then ours.

If I sort by "highest rating" our unclaimed site for our warehouse address shows up about 1/2 way down the page. Many of the listings on the 1st page have NO ratings and/or are unclaimed.
If I sort by "most reviewed" then we are 1st.

Clearly the search function does not work by any normal standard.

Regarding the other items on my list that are "already in the process of being addressed with planned changes to the new site.", I guess that's my point. they should have been addressed before launch. Every launch has its bugs and things that don't quite work out as planned but we are talking about core functions that either weren't coded properly, wern't planned or were hopefull going to skate by those silly Merchants without them noticing (until they did). Either way, the launch was still botched.

Regarding improving the attraction of consumers, there is nothing wrong with that. It's good to attract businesses AND consumers. Just remember that many businesses are B2B and that was the slant that Merchant Circle was pushing not so long ago, that it was a great place to connect with other small busineses.

Here is the latest discussion our team has had regarding features that are being heavily considered for changes per the merchant community (thank you again for all your feedback).....

Invite button is broken--and will (hopefully) be fixed by Tuesday, January 24.

Pictures--Photos are going to be moved up HIGHER on your listing page.

Business Description--Is being moved just below photos, which is being placed higher on the page.

"People who viewed this also viewed...."--this feature is being moved BELOW Photos and Business Description for all claimed listings.

Mayor Program--has been discontinued on the public facing side (moved to the dashboards of merchant accounts) to speed up page load times and clean up the presentation of merchant listings.

The concerns surrounding the discontinuance have recently been expressed to Product and Development and the Community Team is awaiting a response. As soon as we know anything we will let you in on it.

Request a Quote has been temporarily removed from claimed listings-it will likely not be back until better placement and clarity on the feature can be expressed.

Remember, Request a Quote it is still on UNCLAIMED listings--this means, if a browsing customer requests a quote from an unclaimed merchant listing, the request will be sent out to CLAIMED merchants--this is why the feature is still visible behind your dashboard, in your "Customers" tab;.

Reviews and Ratings---Reviews and Ratings may no longer be left anonymously. Customers must register with a valid email to leave a review or rating.

Listing Traffic--the traffic icon on the listing page itself has been removed, you may still monitor your traffic from inside your listing, under Performance. Traffic

My Story has been removed as it was deemed too similar to "Business Information." Content duplication only hurts listings online. We recommend using "Business Information" to tell your story, then use "Products and Services" to list your service details.

Community Bulletins were removed to "clean up" listings for browsing customers and prevent link farming, which hurts the network as a whole.

WE ARE ALREADY SEEING AN INCREASE IN VISITOR TRAFFIC TO THE SITE!!! WE"LL HAVE SOME STATS FOR YOU VERY SOON. THIS IS EXTREMELY EXCITING AND WE ONLY ANTICIPATE THINGS WILL CONTINUE TO GROW!

3 days and the 'People Who Viewed This Also Viewed' box has NOT been moved. WHEN is this going to happen? You take my money to keep my page ad free and yet here is this big box advertising other businesses before you can read about my business.

The whole register to leave a review is ridiculous. While I expect someone to provide valid information, it should not be a requirement to do a full registration in order to leave a review. It was already hard enough to get people to leave a review without making them fully register. Let them sign in with other accounts they may already have. i.e. facebook, twitter, blogger, etc... Let them leave a review by simply providing basic valid info. i.e. name, email, etc... Also, does the review even work? I tried to leave a review for a restaurant and it just sat there saying submitting and nothing ever happened and the review didn't show up. Many many bugs.....

This is a complete outrage! Merchant Circle's greed has cost us thousands of dollars, thousands of hours and they have deleted all of our efforts overnight replacing them with Google Ads!

For those of you who don't understand how it works, let me explain: Merchant Circle gets paid by Google for every time their Ads are shown or clicked on, Merchant Circle removed major components on our page, such as the "Mayor" status and replaced them with Ads only they can cash in on. Of course they offer a "paid" service to remove the Ads (WITH THEIR LATEST UPGRADE BEING A CLEAR EFFORT TO FORCE US TO PAY), but there is no point, as even if the ads are removed, all of our efforts were removed also and we cannot get back our "Mayor" status.

$3,600 DOLLARS LOST BECAUSE OF MERCHANT CIRCLE'S GREED
We paid $200/month x 18 months = $3,600 to our developer to send invitations out every morning

Our Merchant Circle Mayor Status Lost BECAUSE OF MERCHANT CIRCLE'S GREED
It took us 18 months of daily effort and a lot of money invested to reach Merchant Circle Mayor Status

Search Engine Placement Lost BECAUSE OF MERCHANT CIRCLE'S GREED:
After 18 months of Search Engine Optimization, our Merchant Circle page no longer appears on the 1st page of Google; it doesn't appear at all on the first 10 pages!

FREE Quote Button Now Benefits Our Competitors BECAUSE OF MERCHANT CIRCLE'S GREED:
After 18 months of money and effort invested, we had finally received a quote request via the button. Now the button takes you to our competitors... Isn't it just great that Merchant Circle would use our effort and our money to get our page to the 1st page of Google only to remove everything we had worked for and hand the quotes to our competitors? As if it wasn't enough, let's remove all positive results we had achieved through blood, sweat and tears and replace them with Google Ads that only Merchant Circle benefits from.

I agree with the all the "real" comments on this page (there are a lot of fake ones trying to promote positive feedback)... PUT IT BACK, PUT IT BACK, PUT IT BACK!!!

We have three accounts with Merchant Circle... Now Useless
We have signed up clients on Merchant Circle... Now Useless

(I've noticed a lot of topics have been removed by an MC administrator. What's the deal with that? Are all unflattering remarks about the new changes being removed for the purposes of public relations?)

Andy - I'll disagree with that 100% - my post was removed - not moved. I can find it no where on MC. However, I still get the updates to this thread in my e-mail. It use to be our posts would show with our company name and how long we have been with MC, but not any more. I've been with MC it seems like forever and have seen a lot of changes that were very positive. This latest change is horrible and the worst possible that you could have made.

You automatically listed thousands of companies' accountant's addresses, instead of their trading addresses, by taking the legal address from Companies House website. A schoolboy error, surely? No wonder my accountant keeps getting junk mail intended for us. No doubt she'll soon have our customers knocking on her door wanting to buy sunglasses in the Spring. How could you be so stupid?

I'm really sorry for your frustration. I know how difficult it is these days to manage information online and I really would like to help you figure this out.

Hopefully my explanation will shed a little light on this issue.

MerchantCircle listing data is pulled from a 3rd party source (originating from Yellowbook).

Since listings are not manually entered (there are over 15 million listings), the information pulled from our 3rd party source can at times be outdated or incorrect.

With MerchantCircle (and most online directory sites) businesses have the option of editing information free of charge (of course). MerchantCircle and most other online directories require a valid email to do this which ensures competitors do not have a field day with changing other's listing information.

Once you have edited the listing, one of the BEST things to do to start managing online information is tackle the source.

For many directory sites, this source is Localeze (www.localeze.com), also known as Info USA. They have a Help Center where you may search for your business and update or correct the information.

May be a little off topic but This is for all the Mayors or Ex Mayors and the members that put in thousands of hours on MC and now feel a loss of marketing power with the recent changes and it seems clear its up to the new owners to decide whats good or bad now.

So until the smoke clears I posted a suggestion in the Tips and tricks for marketing a business section. If you have a minute check it out. If you dont have the buttons I would add them it seems they are here to stay.

There are lots of us and we can all use our Like buttons and Google +1 buttons to get some SEO juice as they seem to be using them in the serch engine results more and more.

I just tried to connect to your MC page through your image here on 'Get Satisfaction' and it does not link back to your MC listing. I suspect this is the case with any MC merchant posting here.

I find it strange that we get directed to an outside site to post a comment on any of the 'Forums' but we can't link back to that poster's MC page. Why are we forced to use a forum outside the MC loop if we can't get linked back to MC to help with 'Listing Activity'?

This forum is a hosted solution from Get Satisfaction that doesn't include SSON integration with MC, and the major downside compared to our old (home-built) forums is that it doesn't link back to the posters MC account, as it is a different profile on GS.

If you recall, the old forums were broken in many ways...40 seconds to load !, and we didn't have the manpower to build our own, so this SaaS forum will require that our posters place a link to their listing on their posts or profile to facilitate connection through the forums.

The Community Forum is designed for members of MerchantCircle (both consumers and businesses) to get together, swap ideas, get help, provide tips and support for each other and build a community. Connecting with members in your local area, and all around the USA allows you to share your advertisements for your business on the pages of all the members with whom you connect.

The forum allows you to get to know other members, make friends and colleagues around the country, all with a view to supporting you and your business. The strength of the Community Forum lies in the participation of the members. It is you - the customers and businesses that make this a real community. That's why we are here, and we hope you will join us and help grow the best forum community for customers and local businesses on the internet.